Goethe - Life as Art

He was a young man from a good family, an eager student and an ardent romancer. A best-selling author who attained a high-ranking and lucrative position in a small duchy, Goethe dabbled in nature studies, fled to Italy and lived in sin. But for all that he found time to compose the most memorable of love poems, engage in lofty competition with friend and fellow dramatist Schiller, and write a canon of later work that flouted all the conventions. But Goethe wanted more. He wanted his life to be an art-form in itself. Rüdiger Safranski vividly describes the man behind the myth. Fifty years after Richard Friedenthal’s definitive biography, a thick layer of interpretation has settled over Goethe’s creations. Safranski casts new light on the ultimate polymath’s life and work by reappraising primary sources – Goethe’s works, letters, diaries, recorded discourse, and the accounts of his contemporaries. The result is a three-dimensional, living and breathing portrait; a masterfully written book that allows us to see ourselves as contemporaries of a man whose lifespan encompasses the playful Rococo era as well as the Classical and Romantic periods, all the way through to the dour sobriety that marked the start of the steam age. A man whose name came to define his time: the age of Goethe.